Fairtrade certification is intended to improve both the income and living conditions of producers, thereby creating more fairness in international trade. However, theoretical considerations and empirical studies show that this goal is only achieved to a limited extent, at least for coffee: Faitrade certification leads at best to small increases in income for coffee farmers. The results on the reduction of income volatility, payments used to implement social projects, and improved access to credit are also mixed. Fairtrade is a means of market segmentation for roasters and retailers. [...]

As a Professor Emeritus, Gert G. Wagner continues to be very active in research and policy work: he is working as a Senior Research Fellow at the SOEP and as a Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. In April, he joined the network of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society as a Research Associate. Since June, he has been a member of the newly created interdisciplinary research group “Implications of digitization for the quality of science communication" at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) in cooperation with acatech (German Academy of Science and Engineering). In July, he was appointed to the editorial board of the renowned multidisciplinary online journal PLOS One.
Recently he was re-appointed to a four-year term on the Advisory Council for Consumer Affairs of the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection by Katarina Barley, Federal Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection.

In line with its commitment to expanding work in the provision and harmonization of cross-national panel data, the SOEP plans to hold workshops like these on an annual basis in the future.

The 2018 summer school for early-stage researchers combined advanced research on the integration of refugees and migrants with training in the use of a clone of EU-SILC longitudinal data for Germany. The clone was created with the help of SOEP data and is especially valuable in the study of methodological issues in migration research. The different migration subsamples in the SOEP allow more detailed analysis of first- and later-generation migrants in Germany than the original EU-SILC sample provided by Eurostat.

The InGRID Team at DIW Berlin selected 27 of the 154 proposals submitted for the summer school. It was attended by 22 young researchers from the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Ireland, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Luxembourg, Norway, and the Czech Republic. Jürgen Schupp, Vice-Director of SOEP at DIW Berlin, and Maria Metzing opened the summer school on Monday. Over the course of the week, there were four keynote speeches, eight sessions, a poster session where participants presented their work, and a training workshop on the EU-SILC clone.

The first keynote by Tuba Bircan (HIVA-KU Leuven) discussed the representation of migrants in large-scale surveys. The second keynote by Herbert Brücker (IAB, BIM, and Humboldt University Berlin) presented the theoretical framework and discussed descriptive results on the integration of refugees into the labor market. On Wednesday, Roland Verwiebe (University of Vienna) gave a third keynote “On changing social stratification of the city: Why are migrants declining from the middle of society in Vienna?” In the late afternoon, participants attended a screening of the documentary, “Iuventa,” on the rescue of refugees in the Mediterranean Sea. After the film, conference participants discussed the refugee situation in the Mediterranean and the work of NGOs with one of the film’s producers and one of the main characters in the film. On Thursday, there were training workshops on EU-SILC, including a presentation by Heike Nachtigall (SOEP DIW) on EU-SILC and the SOEP clone, a presentation by Sandra Bohmann (SOEP DIW) on the SOEP, and an introduction to the clone in STATA. On Friday, Alyssa Schneebaum (WU Vienna) gave the last keynote on the “Intergenerational educational mobility of children of immigrants and natives across Europe: Evidence from the EU-SILC”.

The summer school gave participants the opportunity to present their research and receive constructive critical feedback from one of the four keynote speakers, Jürgen Schupp, Silke Hans (Georg August University Göttingen), Nicolas Legewie (SOEP / DIW Berlin), and other participants. It also featured a presentation on the InGRID-2 project with information on visiting grants and application procedures.

We thank all of the participants in the workshop for their presentations, keynote speeches, and feedback. Special thanks go to Christine Kurka (SOEP DIW) and Janina Britzke (SOEP DIW) for their support in the organization of the event.

You may find a review of the event here

The DIW Europe Lecture is a lecture series by leading policy-makers and academics on the future of Europe. The series aims at fostering and informing the debate on key European policy issues, and at bringing this debate to the heart of Germany's policy-making in Berlin. In the series lectures were delivered by Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the IMF,  Mario Draghi, president of the ECB, Lawrence H. Summers, former US Secretary of the Treasury and president of Harvard university, and Barry Eichengreen, Professor at Berkley.

The fellowship goes to support her dissertation on immigrant families and their integration into the German labor market.

The dissertation with the title "German Public Utilities: Organisation and Productivity" was supervised by Prof. Dr. Tomaso Duso (Technische Universität Berlin, DIW Berlin) und Dr. Astrid Cullmann (Technische Universität Berlin, DIW Berlin).

We congratulate Caroline on her success and wish her all the best for her future career.

Residential rental markets regulations have become an integral part of everyday life in Germany as in almost all other countries. The strong house price and rent increases over the past decade have fueled social debate on this issue. Tenant movements worldwide are demanding tighter regulations and advocating for affordable housing as a central civil right. In contrast, those skeptical of regulation fear excessive levels will impair market mechanisms. Scientific analyses on this topic have so far often failed due to insufficient data. The present study addresses this problem and presents a unique dataset that quantifies rental market regulations. Indices for measuring regulation intensity are available for 64 countries and date back more than 100 years. The dataset enables an examination of regulation intensities and regimes in a cross-country comparison. Such a comparison shows that Germany—compared to the rest of Europe—has relatively intense rent control which has been tightened even further since 2015. The impact of these changes should be accompanied by further analysis in the future.

Immigration from other EU countries increased Germany’s GDP growth by an average of 0.2 percentage points every year between 2011 and 2016—and for some years, such as 2015, the high point of EU immigration, by even more (0.3 percentage points). Immigrants filling open jobs increases overall economic employment, leads to additional consumer demand, and avoids bottlenecks in the labor market, which would have led to higher production costs and prices and reduced growth accordingly. These are the findings of Marius Clemens, economic researcher at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), and his co-author Janine Hart from the University of Potsdam, which have been published in their new study.

The dissertation with the title "Political Goals, Economic Constraints: Explaining the Motivation and Effects of Economic Sanctions" was supervised by Prof. Marcel Fratzscher, Ph.D. (DIW Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Wolf (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin).

We congratulate Aleksandra on her success and wish her all the best for her future career!

Interview available (from minute 04:32) here 

We congratulate Alexander on his success and wish him all the best for his future career!

Prosperous countries such as Germany can cope with the damage caused by extreme weather comparatively well. Many people and households are insured and when damage is caused by drought, farmers can receive state aid for particularly hard-hit farms. The picture looks quite different in many developing countries. [...]